Pages

Saturday, March 24, 2012

Awesome - Eric Kandel spent most of his life studying single neurons in the marine mollusc Aplysia californica. These sea snails have incredibly large (by comparison) neurons, which makes understanding their function slightly easier. His work extended into other areas of brain function, and in many regards he is one of the fathers of modern neuroscience.

It seems sometimes, okay often, that critical thinking skills are nearly obsolete in this culture. People seem to generally accept whatever they hear without any willingness, desire, or ability to examine its validity. This free little documentary looks at how this works with pseudoscience and "woo woo" stuff in the media - it's decidedly skeptic in its perspective.

Biologists have long observed that groups of animals can coordinate their actions so tightly that each animal does what is best for the group rather than what is best for itself -- even when group members are unrelated. But explaining how such genetically selfless behavior could have evolved has long been just beyond the reach of scientists seeking to employ standard evolutionary theory.

In new theoretical research, Erol Akçay (Princeton) and SFI Omidyar Fellow Jeremy Van Cleve demonstrate the crucial role flexible behaviors might play in the evolution of high levels of cooperation. Such behaviors can include simple negotiations involved in food sharing and the social norms that prevent an individual’s cowardly retreat when a group must defend itself against hostile outsiders. Their work appears in the February issue of The American Naturalist.

By incorporating flexible behaviors into standard biological theory that describes how cooperation evolves based solely on genetic kinship, the researchers suggest that high levels of cooperation can evolve even in groups not composed of close relatives.

Specifically, they find that cooperation can evolve to group-optimal levels when individuals match each other’s actions closely, regardless of the relatedness between individuals.

But kinship does matter. They also find that whether a psychology that enables such behavior-matching evolves or not depends on the relatedness of between-group members.

“Relatedness and behavioral responses can interact synergistically and promote much higher levels of cooperation together than each of them can sustain by themselves,” explains Akçay.

Jeremy says an exciting characteristic of their approach is that it can be used to study the evolution of psychological mechanisms that generate specific behaviors. They demonstrate this by studying how prosocial preferences -- i.e., intrinsic motivations to help others -- can evolve to maximize group benefit.

Although popular in economic theories, prosocial preferences have received little attention by biologists. How easily prosocial preferences evolve depends on the kind of activity in which animals might cooperate.

“When animals hunt cooperatively, they can capture much larger prey than when alone, which is good for all, and this can make high levels of cooperation easier to evolve,” says Jeremy.

For activities where adding additional cooperators makes less of a difference, such as emitting alarms calls when predators are nearby, high levels of cooperation are harder to evolve.

Abstract
Cognition materializes in an interpersonal space. The emergence of complex behaviors requires the coordination of actions among individuals according to a shared set of rules. Despite the central role of other individuals in shaping one’s mind, most cognitive studies focus on processes that occur within a single individual. We call for a shift from a single-brain to a multi-brain frame of reference. We argue that in many cases the neural processes in one brain are coupled to the neural processes in another brain via the transmission of a signal through the environment. Brain-to-brain coupling constrains and shapes the actions of each individual in a social network, leading to complex joint behaviors that could not have emerged in isolation.

Why two (or more) brains are better than one
Although the scope of cognitive neuroscience research is vast and rich, the experimental paradigms used are primarily concerned with studying the neural mechanisms of one individual’s behavioral processes. Typical experiments isolate humans or animals from their natural environments by placing them in a sealed room where interactions occur solely with a computerized program. This egocentric framework is reminiscent of the Ptolemaic geocentric frame of reference for the solar system. From the early days of civilization, stars were not thought to have any influence on the geophysical processes on Earth. The present understanding of gravity, orbits and the tides came about only after the Copernican revolution, which brought about the realization that the Earth is just another element in a complex, interacting system of planets. Along the same lines, we argue here that the dominant focus on single individuals in cognitive neuroscience paradigms obscures the forces that operate between brains to shape behavior.

Verbal communication is an excellent example to illustrate the role that other individuals play in one’s cognitive processes. As Wittgenstein argued, the meaning of a word is defined by its use [1]. The word’s correct use, however, can vary across eras, cultures and contexts. Thus, the appropriate use of a word is grounded in a set of interrelated norms shared by a community of speakers. To master a language, one has to learn the correct uses of words by interacting with other members of the community. Such interactions fundamentally shape the way individuals think and act in the world [2,3]. This is by no means limited to language. Several other nonverbal social and cognitive skills, such as courting, dancing or tool manipulation, require the collaboration of multiple agents that coordinate their behavior according to a shared set of rules and customs. With so many cognitive faculties emerging from interpersonal space, a complete understanding of the cognitive processes within a single individual’s brain cannot be achieved without examining and understanding the interactions among individuals [4]. In this article, we call for a shift from a single-brain to a multi-brain frame of reference.

Brain-to-brain coupling
The premise of brain-to-brain coupling is that the perceptual system of one brain can be coupled to the motor system of another. This binding mechanism builds on a more rudimentary ability of brains to be coupled to the physical world (stimulus-to-brain coupling, Figure 1a). Different objects in the environment emit different forms of energy (mechanical, chemical, electromagnetic), and receptors convert these signals into electrical impulses that the brain can use to infer information about the state of the world and generate appropriate behaviors. Furthermore, organisms are not passive receivers of sensory input but rather actively move their sensory receptor surfaces (hands, eyes, tongues, etc.) to sample information from the environment [5,6]. Thus, stimulus-to-brain coupling is fundamental to the ability to retrieve information about the world to guide actions.

Brain-to-brain coupling also relies on stimulus-to-brain coupling as a vehicle for conveying information. However in brain-to-brain coupling, the signal is generated by another brain and body that resemble one’s own, rather than by inanimate objects in the physical environment (Figure 1b). Brain-to-brain coupling is analogous to a wireless communication system in which two brains are coupled via the transmission of a physical signal (light, sound, pressure or chemical compound) through the shared physical environment.

The coordination of behavior between the sender and receiver enables specific mechanisms for brain-to-brain coupling unavailable during interactions with the inanimate world. For example, seeing or hearing the actions, sensations or emotions of an agent trigger cortical representations in the perceiver (so-called vicarious activations [7,8]). If the agent has a similar brain and body, vicarious activations in the perceiver will approximate those of the agent, and the neural responses will become coupled [7]. If the agent, however, has a brain and body that are fundamentally different from those of the witness, this vicarious activation pattern will look fundamentally different from that in the agent and the brain responses will not be coupled. Vicarious activation, of course, is only one particular mechanism by which the neural responses can be coupled across two brains. In other cases, the neural responses in the receiver can be coupled to the neural responses in the sender in a lawful, but more complex, manner [9].

Brene Brown broke onto the TED Talk scene in October of 2010 with an amazing talk (The Power of Vulnerability), but she was already doing a lot of public speaking before that. This talk is from 2009 at the UP Experience. Below this talk, there is another TEDx Talk from 2010.

"The heart of my work is about the very human need to live with authenticity, resilience and a deep sense of love and belonging," says Brené. Dr. Brown is a researcher, author and award-winning teacher of graduate studies at the University of Houston, where her focus has been the areas of shame, empathy and vulnerability and the effect those powerful emotions have on the way we love, parent and build relationships.

Brene Brown appeared at TEDxKC not long after her TEDxHouston debut - and she offered another great talk.

TEDxKC talk synopsis: In our anxious world, we often protect ourselves by closing off parts of our lives that leave us feeling most vulnerable. Yet invulnerability has a price. When we knowingly or unknowingly numb ourselves to what we sense threatens us, we sacrifice an essential tool for navigating uncertain times -- joy. This talk will explore how and why fear and collective scarcity has profoundly dangerous consequences on how we live, love, parent, work and engage in relationships -- and how simple acts can restore our sense of purpose and meaning.

Speaker: Dr. Brené Brown is a research professor at the University of Houston Graduate College of Social Work where she has spent the past 10 years studying courage, shame and authenticity. She is the Behavioral Health Scholar-in-Residence at the Council on Alcohol and Drugs and has written several books on her research.

Let's start with the "and more" part of that title. In a recent study published in Psychological Science, Daniel Levinson and Richard Davidson at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Jonathan Smallwood at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Science, found that our capacity for working memory is related to the the tendency of our minds to wander (mind-wandering) during a routine task or assignment. Levinson (the lead author of the study) is one of Davidson's graduate students at the Center for Investigating Healthy Minds at the UW-Madison Waisman Center, which is part (I believe) of the Lab for Affective Neuroscience.

Working memory has been correlated with IQ and reading ability in the past (more working memory suggests greater intelligence and greater reading comprehension). But it can also help us stay focused on a task, unless that task is not challenging, which allows our minds to wander. When that happens, "resources get misdirected" and we may lose interested in or failure to complete the task (at the very least, we may read ten pages of a boring book with no retention of the material.

The researchers asked volunteers to perform one of two simple tasks -- either pressing a button in response to the appearance of a certain letter on a screen, or simply tapping in time with one's breath -- and compared people's propensity to drift off.

"We intentionally use tasks that will never use all of their attention," Smallwood explains, "and then we ask, how do people use their idle resources?"

Throughout the tasks, the researchers checked in periodically with the participants to ask if their minds were on task or wandering. At the end, they measured each participant's working memory capacity, scored by their ability to remember a series of letters given to them interspersed with easy math questions.

In both tasks, there was a clear correlation. "People with higher working memory capacity reported more mind wandering during these simple tasks," says Levinson, though their performance on the test was not compromised.

The result is the first positive correlation found between working memory and mind wandering and suggests that working memory may actually enable off-topic thoughts.

"What this study seems to suggest is that, when circumstances for the task aren't very difficult, people who have additional working memory resources deploy them to think about things other than what they're doing," Smallwood says.

Interestingly, when people were given a comparably simple task but filled with sensory distractors (such as lots of other similarly shaped letters), the link between working memory and mind wandering disappeared.

"Giving your full attention to your perceptual experience actually equalized people, as though it cut off mind wandering at the pass," Levinson says.

Citation:

D. B. Levinson, J. Smallwood, R. J. Davidson. The Persistence of Thought: Evidence for a Role of Working Memory in the Maintenance of Task-Unrelated Thinking. Psychological Science, 2012; DOI: 10.1177/0956797611431465

But now his work confirms what he and other researchers at the fringe of where neuroscience overlaps with Buddhism have been proposing for so long - attention can change the wiring of the brain. Moreover, Davidson has identified six unique dimensions of emotional style—each linked with distinct brain structures, brain circuits, and brain activity:

resilience

general outlook (positive or negative)

social intuition

self-awareness

sensitivity to context

attention style (the ability to screen out distractions)

UC Berkeley's Greater Good blog recently reviewed the book for their readers:

A new book from Richard Davidson and Sharon Begley reveals how to train our brains for health and happiness.

We keep hearing about this new science of the brain and all it can tell us about how our minds work, from how our brains influence our decision-making to how our brains influence our love relationships. Now Richie Davidson—professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and one of the most distinguished neuroscientists of our time—claims that our brains determine the nature of our emotional lives, and that we can influence our emotional makeup through concentrated effort.

In his new book with journalist Sharon Begley, The Emotional Life of Your Brain, Davidson distills decades of research on the neurological bases of emotions. He claims that there are six dimensions of emotional style—resilience, general outlook (positive or negative), social intuition, self-awareness, sensitivity to context, and attention style (the ability to screen out distractions)—each reflecting activity in specific brain circuits and structures. All of us, he writes, fall somewhere along a continuum between high and low on each of these dimensions, and much of this depends on how our brains are wired.

Read the rest of the review. Unfortunately, this reviewer seemed more interested in a how-to book than a discussion of the science behind this new model of emotional styles, and found only two chapters of real interest. That's too bad - the science and the development of the ideas through time and against strong resistance is engaging (I suspect this is where Sharon Begley's journalism skills shine).

The University of Wisconsin-Madison has run several stories on Davidson and his new book in the campus news - here are links to two of them:

I liked this new article from Alva Noë at NPR's 13.7 Cosmos and Culture blog. He examines the nature of boredom in terms of detachment, and how that can play itself int he arts and education. Becoming detached through boredom is an opportunity . . . .

Dr. Taub, one of the characters in Fox's television show House, has infant twins. He loves them and wants to care for them. The problem is: he finds spending time with them unbearably boring.
Their
books put him to sleep. He finds it awkward and unnatural to engage in
their play. Taub feels inadequate as a father. I have felt the same way
at times.

It's great to be with your
kids, especially while you do something else. (My infant daughter sleeps
besides me as I type this.) Judging by all the mothers paying more
attention to their smart phones than their children while sitting on
park benches, this is probably not an unusual phenomenon.

I went to a screening of Tarkovsky's film Stalker at the New School in Manhattan last week. There was a panel discussion and Geoff Dyer, whose new book is about Stalker,
warned those in the audience who hadn't seen the film that they ran the
risk of getting bored. The movie was very slow, very little happened.
He ventured that they'd be less bored if they knew right at the start
that this film was no Bourne Identity. It has a totally
different kind of pacing. We could eliminate boredom, or at least
mitigate it, Dyer seemed to suggest, by adjusting our expectations at
the outset.

So, what is boredom, anyway? It
is a state of discomfort, to be sure. It's a state in which we find
ourselves uninterested, perhaps because we are disinterested and
detached.

One might say that boredom is
the besetting sin of art — in all its varieties: performance,
painting, sculpture, film, writing, etc — but also of the lecture hall
and the class room. My 10-year-old son is bored in school. What more
withering criticism of his teachers could one find? And indeed,
describing a movie or book or theatrical performance as boring is about
as damning as it gets.

If you stop to
think about it, though, the link between art and formal education, on
the one hand, and boredom, on the other, may be, if not exactly
unavoidable, then, to a certain degree, inevitable.

Consider
that what all of these — performance, writing, teaching, etc. — have in
common is the structure of detachment. Pupils sit and listen to a
teacher. Audiences pay to watch and scrutinize, but they must keep quiet
and sit in the dark. Visitors to the gallery can look, and think, but
not touch. These events are structured by detachment. That's where they
begin. And so, from the very start, they are always on the verge of
boredom. Boredom is the baseline from which they can, at most, strive to
deviate.

Some artists, writers and
teachers see boredom as the enemy; they battle it the way fire fighters
battle a blaze. In their effort to deviate from the baseline, from
boredom, they engage the audience. They try to pull down the
wall separating them from the kids, or audience, or visiting public. At
its best, they do this by, in effect, putting on display a thing of
value — knowledge, a story, a sculpture, a painting, whatever — while
also providing the tools the audience needs to understand it.

For
instance, a piece of music may begin by introducing a theme, thus
giving the audience the resources to know what to pay attention to as
the theme is developed in the sequel. This strategy also runs some
pretty high risks. At the end of the day, the sort of engagement
provided by art is only ersatz. You don't really know or really care
about Romeo and Juliet, or the Stalker and his clients, or Jason Bourne.

Indeed,
at its worse, the impulse to deny boredom finds its expression in mere
stagecraft and manipulation, in the willingness to pander and entertain.
We find this tendency at work even in education, where teachers are
increasingly pressured to think of their students as, in effect,
products, whose performance specifications are being molded, rather than
people with minds of their own.

There
is another approach to boredom in the arts, one that is, perhaps, more
common in the avant-garde. If boredom stems from detachment, and if some
measure of detachment is unavoidable in art (and in life), than getting
bored is not just an irritating state, it's an opportunity.

This seems to be how Tarkovsky thought about Stalker.
When the studio supporting the film asked him to think more of the
audience and pick up the pace, he responded by slowing things down even
more. He was trying to be boring.

Or
take the case of John Cage. I understand he was invited to give an
important series of lectures at Harvard toward the end of his life. As I
understand, he produced his three lectures by randomly mixing words
from a few different books of note — one of them was Wittgenstein's Tractatus,
I believe — and he then simply read these aloud. Eventually his
audience had dwindled to two or three people. He'd been very, very
boring. But by affording his listeners maximal detachment — there were
no ideas to get, no plot to follow, no meaning to perceive — he had
afforded them a different kind of freedom, to think, to let the mind
wander, or to contemplate what was happening.

Detachment may be unavoidable in the arts. It is not unavoidable in life (even if conflicts about our attachments may be).

I
think Dr. Taub ended up getting it just right. He realized that he can
spend time with his kids not by watching them or trying to be one of
them, but by doing his own thing with them. So he read the girls
articles about the NFL. His enthusiasm was contagious. They couldn't
understand anyway. They all had a good time. Taub stopped being bored by
his kids when he stopped looking, perceiving, watching and thinking,
and figured out how to just hang out with them.You can keep up with more of what Alva Noë is thinking on Facebook and Twitter.

Wednesday, March 21, 2012

Alexander Shulgin is a god-like figure in some underground circles, especially those who think of themselves as psychonauts (explorers of inner space, often with entheogens and designer psychedelics). He rediscovered MDMA (ecstasy) after it had long been forgotten by Merck. He authored the two most important references on designer hallucinogens (see below), and he was the first to synthesize and test (on himself) many of these drugs.

A beautiful new film tells the story of Alexander Shulgin, the chemist who re-discovered MDMA (after it was synthesised and abandoned by Merck) and went on to discover hundreds of psychedelic drugs such as the 2C* family. He is famous not only for independently discovering and developing so many psychedelics but for testing them extensively on himself and for writing the core textbooks of the psychedelic literature, PiHKAL (‘Phenethylamines I Have Known and Loved’) and TiHKAL (‘Tryptamines I Have Known and Loved).

This documentary has been around for a while, but it's a god documentary. When the research here was first published, it received a lot of attention. Subsequent research has supported the studies detailed in the film.

Filmmaker Isabelle Raynauld offers up scientific research that suggests that mystical ecstasy is a transformative experience.

It could contribute to people’s psychic and physical health, treat depression and speed up the healing process when combined with conventional medicine.

This documentary reveals the exploratory work of a team from the University of Montreal who seek to understand the states of grace experienced by mystics and those who meditate. In French with English subtitles.

Those of us care about and research such things have long known that American Psychiatric Association (APA) is the Emperor wearing no clothes when it comes to the efficacy of SSRI antidepressants. The basic premise of the drug industry is that depression is caused by low levels of the brain neurotransmitter serotonin. So if you are depressed, you need a drug that makes more serotonin available in your brain, which is what the selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitors (SSRI) tend to do.

The only problem is that it never has been proven that depression is caused by low levels of serotonin (Lacasse & Leo, 2005), and in fact there is not even any proven correlation. Some of the most recent research suggests that

problems in information processing within neural networks, rather than changes in chemical balance, might underlie depression, and that antidepressant drugs induce plastic changes in neuronal connectivity, which gradually lead to improvements in neuronal information processing and recovery of mood. (Castrén, 2005)

Over the long term, the long term is considerable evidence that SSRIs cause neurogenesis, which can improve neuronal connectivity and create new network connections (neuroplasticity). In this way, SSRIs may help over a period of years, but not weeks or months.

One other theory on why some people feel better on antidepressants despite no measurable improvement in depression scores is that raised levels of serotonin create abnormal brain states that relieve the symptoms of depression:

Finally, there has been a huge bias in the published studies. Most of those published have used severely depressed subjects, the only population known to show any improvement on these drugs. More importantly, one study found that of 74 studies registered with the FDA, 94% of those published showed positive outcomes, while only 51% of the total showed positive outcomes (Turner, et al, 2008). This does not even take into account the questionable statistical games drugs companies use to generate outcomes.

With that background, here is the CBS segment from 60 Minutes, along with an additional segment not aired that discusses the placebo effect.

Tuesday, March 20, 2012

Animal Science professor Temple Grandin (Colorado State University) rose to public awareness - and fame - through the gift of her autism. Her brain wiring is considered a "handicap" in our culture, but it allows her to empathize in deep ways with the feelings of animals (Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behavior). Her ability to see in pictures allowed her to help redesign cattle yards to reduce the fear the animals experience, and she still works as a consultant to the cattle industry.

In this Google Talk she speaks more about her other passion, neurodiversity - she does not, for example, support interventions that would eliminate the entire autism spectrum.

At the bottom I have also included another talk she gave at the UC Davis M.I.N.D. Institute.

There are many different kinds of minds and, when they work together, they can really complement each other. Temple is a visual thinker who thinks in photo realistic pictures. This has helped her in her design work. Another type of mind is the mathematical mind. This kind of mind is really good at computer programming and engineering. The third type of mind is a verbal word thinker. Temple will discuss successful projects where the different kinds of minds worked together and a few disasters that could have been prevented by input from more than one type of mind.

Tune in for this unusual presentation on autism by someone with autism. Animal Science professor Temple Grandin, who designs livestock handling facilities, discusses the value of early intervention in autism, and about medications. Other topics include her sensory sensitivities and how she manages them, how she and other autistic people think, and social relationships and careers. Series: "M.I.N.D. Institute Lecture Series on Neurodevelopmental Disorders"

In our dystopian present, the term speculation is
associated with an epistemology of greed, a sanctioned terrorism, and a
new dimension of imperialism no longer based in production but in
abstract futures. But speculation means something else for those who
refuse to give its logic over to power and profit. >>

"What will you do when the apocalypse comes??" he asked me
urgently. My first reaction was to laugh derisively. But a friend made
me think twice. "Who knows, maybe he's right," she said. Then came the
Tsunami that devastated South Asia in 2004. And the levees that breached
during Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Who's to say what's real?>>

Science fictions never present the future, only "a
significant distortion of the present," as Delany wrote in 1984. But
they also distort the present of anyone reading at any time, even the
text's own future. The contours of Dhalgren's disintegrating city belong
to the wake of 1960s countercultures and social movements, to a sexual
and racial moment whose history uninformed new generations of readers
will learn as they read, even if they fail to recognize it. Sexual
pleasure in Delany's work links the past and present and lets a
different future feel possible, even when it takes place within
structuring limitations. >>

Chinese-Canadian author Larissa Lai imaginatively
interrogates the boundaries of the human, alchemizes myths of origin,
and embraces the impurity of the cyborg while foregrounding the politics
of racialization, animality, and sexuality. Lai builds on the rich
tradition of women of color writing in sf/speculative fiction by
splicing together cultural theory and current events with a panoply of
intertexts. Traversing past, present, and future, Lai maps the
permeability of the human through the vectors of animal,
creator-goddess, cyborg, and transgenic procreation. Her distinctive
métissage of Chinese legend, EuroAmerican culture, Orientalist
archetypes, Western popular music, and science fiction disrupts cycles
of institutionalized exploitation, corporatized amnesia, and
multicultural assimilation.[1] Akin to the work of Octavia Butler, Karen
Tei Yamashita, and Nalo Hopkinson, Lai's...>>

China Miéville is the recipient of multiple awards for his
speculative/science/weird fiction novels, and the only author ever to
win three Arthur C. Clarke Awards. His most recent novel, Embassytown,
came out in May 2011 and has received enthusiastic reviews. As well as
writing fiction, Miéville earned his Ph.D. at London School of Economics
in International Law and is the author of Between Equal Rights, A
Marxist Theory of International Law (2006). Known for his radical
fictive speculation, China Miéville is also fiercely engaged with
radical politics--he stood for the House of Commons as candidate for the
Socialist Alliance in the 2001 UK general election--and so is often
asked about the relationship between his politics and his writing. He...>>

The short film accompanying musician and designer M.I.A.'s
(Maya Arulpragasam, who is British of Sri Lankan Tamil descent) song
"Born Free" was released in April of 2010 and immediately banned from
YouTube. Arulpragasam is no stranger to controversy, since she has drawn
attention to the violence perpetrated against the Tamil minority in Sri
Lanka, while her music and accompanying visual work is replete with
references to different forms of political violence and identification
with non-western persecuted populations.One of the few female artists in
contemporary popular music that fuse explicit political content with
cutting edge sounds, Arulpragasam has often been accused of toying with
radical chic and being politically naïve, rather than associated with a
long tradition of women of color...>>

Race is an illusion. So say we all! But what do we intend
by this saying, this performative? Denise Ferreira da Silva is but the
most recent of scholars to note that, in dispelling race from its
improper place in the order of the human sciences, casting it into
disrespectability along with sorcery, alchemy, and other bait for the
credulous, we consolidate that much more firmly the protocols of
scientific rationality. But the protocols of science gave us race as an
invidious distinction in the first place. Reason giveth, and reason
taketh away, seems to be the faith animating the claim "Race is an
illusion." But what if were to suspend such faith in the subject of
Enlightenment rationality? What...>>

When it comes to dealing with misfortune and injustice,
the most effective tool to use if we want to make sure that troubles
will persist without relief is a simple sentence: That's water under the
bridge. No use crying over spilled milk. The past is over and done
with. The goose is cooked. What's done is done.Whenever people have
their attention called to injuries that occurred in the past, it is
almost certain that someone will pipe up with a demand that everyone cut
short the desire to improve the world and, instead, to defer to the
water-under-the-bridge school of history.[1]There are is perhaps no
better example of the water-under-the-bridge school of thought in the
settler-colonial imagination, than Orson Scott...>>

The Natives should have died off by now. To still be alive
is a miracle. Can you taste two billion year old air on your breath or
the remnants of primordial seas in your sweat? Do you feel e-coli
breaking bread in your bowels? Does your heart synch up with these
words, these poetic echoes of ancient ancestors? Self and other,
simultaneously...>>

Posted by Philip Ryan on 13 Mar 2012

Richard Eskow attended the 2011 Buddhist Geeks conference and sank his teeth into a lot of meaty ideas that he's still chewing on. (Apologies to Richard for that overdone metaphor.)

He spoke to teacher and translator Ken McLeod soon after the conference ended and discussed a wide range of topics, including the almost-taboo subject of paying for the dharma. Not long after that, Richard spoke to the cofounder and Chief Geek of Buddhist Geeks, Vincent Horn, and this conversation we are happy to present below, in two parts.

Vince is no stranger to the audio interview game—Buddhist Geeks is now on episode number (prepare your mind to be boggled...) 249! (It's trainer/Zen practitioner/psychology professor Rob McNamara.) The Buddhist Geeks 2012 conference will be held August 9th to 11th in Boulder, Colorado—more info here.

RSA Thursday

Head of the University of Reading’s Evolution Laboratory and one of the world’s leading experts on human development - Mark Pagel - uses evolutionary biology, anthropology, natural history, philosophy and years of observing human behaviour around the globe to shed light on our species’ capacity for culture, cooperation and community.

Since humans left Africa less than a hundred thousand years ago there has been a staggering explosion of cultures. What caused this blooming of diversity? Why are there so many mutually incomprehensible languages, even within small territories? Why do we rejoice in rituals, wrap ourselves in flags, or define ourselves in opposition to others?

Humans are usually seen as differing from other animals because of our inherent traits of consciousness, language and intelligence. But have we had it the wrong way round? Many of these things would not exist without our propensity for culture - our ability to co-operate in small tribal societies, enabling us to pass on knowledge, beliefs and practices so that we prospered while others declined.

Join Mark Pagel at the RSA when he will demonstrate how the role of culture in natural selection shows how humans developed a mind that is hardwired for culture - so that it has outstripped our genes in determining who we are, how we think and speak, who we love and kill - and how it equips us for the challenges of life in the modern world.

Biologist Mark Pagel shares an
intriguing theory about why humans evolved our complex system of
language. He suggests that language is a piece of "social technology"
that allowed early human tribes to access a powerful new tool:
cooperation.

Using biological evolution as a template, Mark Pagel wonders how languages evolve.

Nice talk by Erika Rosenberg at the Upaya Zen Center on working with emotions through meditation. This is a topic relevant to a lot of people who use meditation as a part of their mental health regimen, or as part of their psychotherapy.

Episode Description: How do we use the skills we develop in meditation practice and use them to understand our emotions? In a lively and engaging style, Erika explores emotions and discusses how we can work with them.

Teacher Bio: Erika Rosenberg received her Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of California, San Francisco (1994) and her B.S. in Neuroscience from San Jose State University (1986). Dr. Rosenberg’s scientific research has examined how our feelings are revealed in our facial expressions, how social factors influence emotional signals, and how anger affects cardiovascular health. Her work is published in a wide range of psychological journals and books, and she speaks at national conferences on the topics of emotions and facial expressions. Erika Rosenberg currently collaborates with other scientists on numerous projects in psychology, medicine, and computer science.

Dr. Rosenberg served on the faculties of the University of Delaware and the College of William and Mary, currently conducts research at the Center for Mind and Brain at the University of California, Davis, teaches at the Nyingma Institute of Tibetan Studies in Berkeley, and offers workshops worldwide.

This essay is part of Demystifying the Mind, a special report on the new science of consciousness. The next installments will appear in the February 25 and March 10 issues of Science News.

When Francis Crick decided to embark on a scientific research career, he chose his specialty by applying the “gossip test.” He’d noticed that he liked to gossip about two especially hot topics in the 1940s — the molecular basis for heredity and the mysteries of the brain. He decided to tackle biology’s molecules first. By 1953, with collaborator James Watson (and aided by data from competitor Rosalind Franklin), Crick had identified the structure of the DNA molecule, establishing the foundation for modern genetics.

A quarter century later, he decided it was time to try the path not taken and turn his attention to the brain — in particular, the enigma of consciousness.

At first, Crick believed the mysteries of consciousness would be solved with a striking insight, similar to the way the DNA double helix structure explained heredity’s mechanisms. But after a while he realized that consciousness posed a much tougher problem. Understanding DNA was easier because it appeared in life’s history sooner; the double helix template for genetic replication marked the beginning of evolution as we know it. Consciousness, on the other hand, represented evolution’s pinnacle, the outcome of eons of ever growing complexity in biochemical information processing.

“The simplicity of the double helix … probably goes back to near the origin of life when things had to be simple,” Crick said in a 1998 interview. “It isn’t clear there will be a similar thing in the brain.”

In fact, it has become pretty clear that deciphering consciousness will definitely be more difficult than describing the dynamics of DNA. Crick himself spent more than two decades attempting to unravel the consciousness riddle, working on it doggedly until his death in 2004. His collaborator, neuroscientist Christof Koch of Caltech, continues their work even today, just as dozens of other scientists pursue a similar agenda — to identify the biological processes that constitute consciousness and to explain how and why those processes produce the subjective sense of persistent identity, the self-awareness and unity of experience, and the “awareness of self-awareness” that scientists and philosophers have long wondered about, debated and sometimes even claimed to explain.

So far, no one has succeeded to anyone else’s satisfaction. Yes, there have been advances: Understanding how the brain processes information. Locating, within various parts of the brain, the neural activity that accompanies certain conscious perceptions. Appreciating the fine distinctions between awareness, attention and subjective impressions. But yet with all this progress, the consciousness problem remains popular on lists of problems that might never be solved.

Perhaps that’s because the consciousness problem is inherently similar to another famous problem that actually has been proved unsolvable: finding a self-consistent set of axioms for deducing all of mathematics. As the Austrian logician Kurt Gödel proved eight decades ago, no such axiomatic system is possible; any system as complicated as arithmetic contains true statements that cannot be proved within the system.

Gödel’s proof emerged from deep insights into the self-referential nature of mathematical statements. He showed how a system referring to itself creates paradoxes that cannot be logically resolved — and so certain questions cannot in principle be answered. Consciousness, in a way, is in the same logical boat. At its core, consciousness is self-referential awareness, the self’s sense of its own existence. It is consciousness itself that is trying to explain consciousness.

Self-reference, feedback loops, paradoxes and Gödel’s proof all play central roles in the view of consciousness articulated by Douglas Hofstadter in his 2007 book I Am a Strange Loop. Hofstadter is (among other things) a computer scientist, and he views consciousness through lenses unfamiliar to most neuroscientists. In his eyes, it’s not so bizarre to compare math and numbers to the mind and consciousness. Math is, after all, deeply concerned with logic and reason — the stuff of thought. Mathematical paradoxes, Hofstadter points out, open up “profound questions concerning the nature of reasoning — and thus concerning the elusive nature of thinking — and thus concerning the mysterious nature of the human mind itself.”

Enter the loop
In particular, Hofstadter seizes on Gödel’s insight that a mathematical formula — a statement about a number — can itself be represented by a number. So you can take the number describing a formula and insert that number into the formula, which then becomes a statement about itself. Such a self-referential capability introduces a certain “loopiness” into mathematics, Hofstadter notes, something like the famous Escher print of a right hand drawing a left hand, which in turn is drawing the right hand. This “strange loopiness” in math suggested to Hofstadter that something similar is going on in human thought.

So when he titled his book “I Am a Strange Loop,” Hofstadter didn’t mean that he was personally loopy, but that the concept of an individual — a persistent identity, an “I,” that accompanies what people refer to as consciousness — is a loop of a certain sort. It’s a feedback loop, like the circuit that turns a whisper into an ear-piercing screech when the microphone whispered into is too close to the loudspeaker emitting the sound.

But consciousness is more than just an ordinary feedback loop. It’s a strange loop, which Hofstadter describes as a loop capable of perceiving patterns in its environment and assigning common symbolic meanings to sufficiently similar patterns. An acoustic feedback loop generates no symbols, just noise. A human brain, though, can assign symbols to patterns. While patterns of dots on a TV screen are just dots to a mosquito, to a person, the same dots evoke symbols, such as football players, talk show hosts or NCIS agents. Floods of raw sensory data trigger perceptions that fall into categories designated by “symbols that stand for abstract regularities in the world,” Hofstadter asserts. Human brains create vast repertoires of these symbols, conferring the “power to represent phenomena of unlimited complexity and thus to twist back and to engulf themselves via a strange loop.”

Consciousness itself occurs when a system with such ability creates a higher-level symbol, a symbol for the ability to create symbols. That symbol is the self. The I. Consciousness. “You and I are mirages that perceive themselves,” Hofstadter writes.

This self-generated symbol of the self operates only on the level of symbols. It has no access to the workings of nerve cells and neurotransmitters, the microscopic electrochemical machinery of neurobiological life. The symbols that consciousness contemplates don’t look much like the real thing, the way a map of Texas conveys nothing of the grass and dirt and asphalt and bricks that cover the physical territory.

And just like a map of Texas remains remarkably stable over many decades — it doesn’t change with each new pothole in a Dallas street — human self-identity remains stable over a lifetime, despite constant changes on the micro level of proteins and cells. As an individual grows, matures, changes in many minute ways, the conscious self’s identity remains intact, just as Texas remains Texas even as new skyscrapers rise in the cities, farms grow different crops and the Red River sometimes shifts the boundary with Oklahoma a bit.

If consciousness were merely a map, a convenient shortcut symbol for a complex mess of neurobiological signaling, perhaps it wouldn’t be so hard to figure out. But its mysteries multiply because the symbol is generated by the thing doing the symbolizing. It’s like Gödel’s numbers that refer to formulas that represent truths about numbers; this self-referentialism creates unanswerable questions, unsolvable problems.

A typical example of such a Gödelian paradox is the following sentence: This sentence cannot be true.

Is that sentence true? Obviously not, because it says it isn’t true. But wait — then it is true. Except that it can’t be. Self-referential sentences seem to have it both ways — or neither way.

And so perceptual systems able to symbolize themselves — self-referential minds — can’t be explained just by understanding the parts that compose them.